WoW Skinning

Skinning allows players to gather leather and hides by skinning animals. Leather and hides are used for leatherworking. Leather is also used for some blacksmithing, engineering, and tailoring recipes.

First, find an NPC who can teach you the skinning profession (look for the words "" under the NPC's name). They will likely be somewhere near leatherworking trainers. Now, you need to purchase a skinning knife. You can find skinning knives at merchants who sell Profession-related items. Place the skinning knife somewhere in your bag. You do not need to equip it.

How to Skin Animals

Only certain monsters can be skinned. When you kill a monster, select its corpse to see if it is skinnable. If the animal is skinnable, it will display "Skinnable," with a color to indicate the difficulty. Open up your abilities book and find the Skinning icon. Drag the icon over to your action bar. Right-click on the icon and target a corpse that is marked as skinnable. Your character will then begin to skin the monster. You can also simply just right-click on the corpse to skin it after it has been looted.

Skinning Information

As your skill goes up, you become better at gathering higher-quality materials.

The text displaying "Skinnable" is colored the same way as other trade skill abilities, indicating how difficult the task is (or whether it's even possible at your current skill level) as well as how likely you are to earn skill points.

You cannot skin the monster if your skill is not high enough. You will have to practice on lower-level monsters that are easier until you have enough skill to skin a higher-level monster.

If you kill the animal (or it's your turn to loot it in a group), you must loot it before you can skin it.

You can skin animals that have been killed by other players that are just lying around if they have looted the corpse.

Mineral Veins

After you find a mineral vein, right-click on it to begin mining. If you are successful, you will now be able to loot some minerals and possibly some rough stones. If you fail, try again. Continue to mine the mineral vein until it disappears.

Mining Components

When you mine, you will find three main types of ingredients: metal, stones, and gems. Gems are rare and are used for better recipes for other professions, such as blacksmithing or engineering. Collect all the ingredients you find and keep them for later. Stones can be transformed by Blacksmiths and Engineers without the use of a forge. Many of these components can also be found from killing monsters or bought from other players.

When you mouse over the mineral vein, you will see a color showing whether you will gain skills by mining it.

Gray - You cannot increase your skill by mining.

Green - These mineral veins give you a fairly poor chance to increase your skill. You can still do it, but its going to take a lot of gathering/creation to up your skill with these mineral veins.

Yellow - These mineral veins give you a reduced chance of increasing your skill. Its still pretty reasonable to try to increase your skills with these mineral veins.

Orange - These mineral veins give you your best chance of increasing your skill. For many of the Professions making an orange item will always increase your skill.

Red - you cannot mine it yet. You need a higher mining skill.

After you have mastered the mining of a particular type of mineral, you will no longer gain skills by mining it. However, you can still use the minerals and stones you mine.

Using a Forge/Smelting

Now that you have the precious metal, you can smelt it into bars that can be used for creating armor, weapons, or other items through the blacksmithing or engineering skills.

Find yourself a forge. They are located in main towns and some smaller towns. If you can't find one, ask around to determine their locations. To confirm you have in fact found a forge, move your mouse over the location and see if it says "forge". You can also try smelting the metals. You do not need to interact with the forge; you only need to be near it.

Now that you have found a forge, its time to smelt the metal. Open up your abilities book and locate the smelting icon. Press that to see your recipes. Some examples of what you can create with smelting are: converting copper ore into copper bars and creating bronze by combining copper bars and tin bars. To gain additional smelting recipes/options, you will need to learn them from a mining trainer. The mining screen will tell you how many of each bar that you can smelt based on the types and amounts of raw material that you have.

Claim Jumping

You will undoubtedly run into another player who is after the same mineral node as you; in fact you might not even see each other before you are both mining it. This is a place where you have the opportunity to be kind or greedy or even-handed with your character. You might offer the other person the mineral node, or try to take it all for yourself, or even offer to alternate mining at the node to increase both of your skills. If another player is fighting a monster next to a mining node, it's generally assumed they are planning on mining after their fight. It's nice to let them finish their fight and mine. If you wish to mine, it's best to first find out if they are going to mine that spot before jumping in and taking the mine (which can be perceived as rude).

General Information

Dark Iron is found mostly inside instances such as Blackrock Depths or Molten Core. Dark Iron must be smelted inside Blackrock Mountain inside an instance.

You can purchase an enchant to gloves that will increase your mining skill. There is also an engineering item that raises mining.

You can earn money by mining and selling bars, stones, or gems on the auction house.

Sometimes you might want to sell ore on the auction house instead of bars because miners like to purchase those to level up their mining.

You can share a skill point increase on a mining node by taking turns. One player gathers some ore, then another player gathers ore.